Ancient Woodland: History, Industry and Crafts

By Ian Rotherham

Though most of us will have enjoyed strolling through beautiful British woodlands, we might not be aware of the ancient – and often complex – origins of our surroundings. From medieval times, woodlands were carefully managed commodities with hotly contested resources: conflicting demands from landowners, the Crown, the peasantry and local and national wood-based industries have all left their marks on today's woodland. Ian D. Rotherham here explains the various uses of British woods and their industries, such as coppicing, charcoal-burning, basket-making and bodging, and helps the reader to seek out the clues to their woodland's past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Mar 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9780747813293

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

CONTRARY TO POPULAR BELIEF, Britain’s ancient woodlands are not ‘wildwoods’, or even remnants of ‘wildwood’. These truly cultural landscapes mix nature and human history, woven as uniquely rich tapestries of ecology and history. The story of the woods is there to be ‘read’ if you have time, enthusiasm, and this book, which will take you from prehistory to the present day. The types of landscape, geology and climate, and even differences in industries and manufacturing history, have placed varying demands on woods to create strong regional distinctiveness. This has led to woods developing local character depending on the ecological type of woodland present originally, and then the varying uses to which it has been put over the centuries by craftsmen as diverse as the bodgers of the Chilterns and the tan-bark merchants of Cumbria.

Ancient hazel coppice, Lathkill Dale, Derbyshire.

There is widespread popular and academic interest in woodlands and their history and archaeology. Yet there is little literature that addresses these topics. Based on over twenty years of field and archival research, this book is unique in bringing together this information in a single accessible volume. With the publication in 2008 of the Woodland Heritage Manual there is now an accepted approach to the subject and interest in this long-neglected field is growing rapidly. The subject covers a wide range of topics, from extractive industries in woods, to the crafts based on extraction or harvesting of woodland products, and their processing. For centuries, these crafts were at the centre of British society, fundamental in the creation and protection of many of the landscapes we value today. However, as technologies changed and markets for products evolved, many of the woodland traditions and crafts were abandoned and forgotten, with just a few of the old crafts surviving to the present day. The footprints of lost craftsmen are indelibly etched into every ancient wood across the country; the only problem is in recognising and understanding the evidence. Even the wild woodland flowers and their distribution reflects the one-time uses of the sites, as do the formerly ‘worked’ trees. Humps and bumps of soil are now archaeology. These woods contain uniquely rich diversities of features ancient and modern, from wood banks and ditches, to trackways, charcoal hearths, Q-pits, bell-pits, quarries and building platforms.

Ancient small-leaved lime, Whitwell Wood.

Reading these landscapes can take you back over four thousand years of history, even in urban ancient woodland. It can help us reconstruct the local landscape and its unique history. Not only is the evidence physically imprinted into the environment, but woods and wooded landscapes are also recorded in place names, settlement names, and field names such as Wood End, Wood Lane, Hagg Side, Hollins End, Endowood, Woodseats, Woodthorpe, Willowgarth, Owlerton and the like. Woodseats, for example, would be ‘the cottages deep in the wood’, and Clayroyd a ‘woodland clearing with clayey soil’. From early medieval times, woods were themselves named: Park Spring or Parkwood Springs (the park coppice wood), West Haigh Wood (the enclosed wood), Newfield Spring (the coppice wood by the new field), and many others. Family names also reflect the wooded past with Underwood, Woodward, Hurst, Frith, Wood, Turner, Collier, Greenwood, Tanner, Forester, Warren, Warrender, Stubbs and Parker being just a few examples.

Wood and timber were of great importance before plastic was invented. Here is a bread oven door from the 1600s, carved from oak.

The most familiar woodland flower and often an indicator of an old woodland site – the native bluebell.

To walk through an ancient wood is to tread in the footsteps of the ghosts of those who once lived and worked in the medieval and early industrial countryside. The ancient wood is frequently part of a greater landscape of medieval park, of common or heath, of chase or forest. This book helps unravel the mysteries of the past now locked away in soils and trees. Identifying ancient coppice stools, stubbed